The Internet: Ricin-free?

Speaking of Declan McCullagh, as Nick is below, via his always-useful Politech comes this interesting essay debunking the widely-repeated factoid that one can find convenient recipes for ricin on the Internet.

The mythology of the recipe for ricin exposes one of the most nettlesome ironies of instantaneous world wide communication. Although it has always been promised that the ubiquity of networked computing would enable a host of alternative information sources, what is found is that -- in practice and when push comes to shove -- the allegedly vast ocean of alternatives all say the same thing, with only minor variations, all drawing from the same text, the same myth.

The piece is worth reading in full, with some interesting history of the spread of dubious and crappy "recipes for danger" amongst edgy, thrill-seeking teens (and the federal agents who love them) that should remind you of controversies over the old-fashioned, paper-based Anarchist Cookbook, similarly a source of often useless or dangerous recipes.

I must sadly confess that my own Google gropings for searches on such things as "recipe for ricin" were unable to dig up even this bad recipe that George Smith writes about in the link above.

A good recipe for the horrendous poison was, however, according to this New York ABC-TV report from a year ago, available from the U.S. Patent Office.

Comments

[Shannon Love]

I never understood ricin's reputation as a terror weapon. It's a giant protein molecule like a snake venom it must be injected to be truly dangerous. Like snake venom you can eat and breath it by the teaspoons of it without ill effect.

I think it would be easier to kill a lot of people with bleach and lye mixed together that with a pound of ricin.

[dj of raleigh]

Don't think I would be doing Googles on Ricin production!
Safer to have your fingerprints on library books about it.

[Chuck]

By googling for "ricin extraction", I found a copy of Silent Death, by Uncle Fester, at Amazon.com. Chapter 10 deals with ricin extraction (and page images are available online). Took about 3 minutes.

[edt]

"Entitled "How to Make Ricin," the recipe may appear slightly convincing to journalists and observers with no prior knowledge of the isolation and purification of fine biochemicals. However, there are no steps in the recipe specific to the purification of ricin."

This is annoyingly vague. There are loads of (correct) recipes for the extraction of mescaline from cacti on the internet. They have no "steps in the recipe[s] specific to the purification of" mescaline. Indeed at the end of them you end up with a crystaline substance which is a mixture of various amines from the original cactus. The recipes are examples of a "push-pull" extraction of amines common in any organic chemistry classroom, but they extract all lewis bases from the plant, not a specific chemical

"The recipe includes instructions for the use of acetone and lye -- a non-specific term for any strong base, usually sodium or potassium hydroxide. Both are common chemicals. However, neither powerfully address any unique properties of ricin which would be exploited to differentially separate it from every other complex component in the mash of a castor seed.? Indeed, the entire recipe shows no real effort to achieve this end.? Even the step by step instructions, as written, can be picked apart for a variety of reasons."

True. If ricin were soluable in acetone, then soaking it in acetone would extract it (with other stuff), but the lye would tend to lower yields, since it would saponify the oils, locking the ricin inside. I believe the original recipe was based upon the above-mentioned push-pull method of extracting amines. Ricin is a nitrogen containing compound (an amine), but it is made up of amino acids which have a basic part and an acidic part. Therefore the using a strong base to drive ricin out of aqueous solutions wouldn't work, since it is neutral.

Kudos to the reader who found Uncle Fester's book. A lot of stuff he writes doesn't actually work since he never personally tried it, but as he is a real chemist, it's at least based on actual papers and patents he found.